Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:26PM
from the man-with-a-plan dept.

azzkicker writes "It looks like J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars VII. From the article: 'Sources have confirmed the Star Trek Into Darkness filmmaker will helm the next Star Wars movie, the highly anticipated installment in the landmark franchise scheduled to reach theaters in 2015."

Actually Mr Anonymous, many of the best episodes of classic sci-fi series like Star Trek and Stargate were all based on time-travel. Yesterday's Enterprise, Anyone?

In other words, you are wrong and it is actually the complete opposite. Time Travel scares away novice sci-fi writers because they cannot wrap their heads around the paradoxical nature of such concepts, while the great writers are able to mold the concept into compelling, memorable science fiction.

the best original trek were about the human condition... I'm sure you can name some of your favorite episodes that leap to mind... but for me it is TOS like the Menagerie, or TNG like "The Inner Light" (where he plays the flute on) or the one about Enkidu and Gilgamesh.

When Spock dies in Wrath of Khan, tell me you didn't cry... now tell me even one memorably emotional scene from anything after Generations

The new stuff is fine.. but its... where is the heart? Maybe I'm just old but...

Abrams has really shown great ability to come up with a good story context and set up a world and characters we get pulled into and care about.. and then CONSISTENTLY fails to take them to a satisfying conclusion...

He's the biggest SF-tease evar.

Maybe Abrams could start it up and get the story rolling for VII and VIII but then they could let someone with a history of doing it right (Joss where for art thou?) bring it on home in IX

But if you say that, that means you are too stupid to follow it, not that you thought it was just a shit movie. I pirated it and have it on my laptop and have still never made it through. Someone should have told them that character development isn't just talking about a character, but trying to get the audience to connect with the character. It was just bad.

His Star Trek movie *sucked*. The only thing it did better than previous Star Trek movies was the special effects. Everything else from plot to character development was terrible. He basically turned Star Trek into a Michael Bay movie and of course the same moronic people who love the Terminator franchise rant and rave about how good his rebooted trek is. The guy is a fucking joke. I can only laugh now about Star Wars, in that they found the one guy who can make George Lucas look talented.

More misses than hits in my opinion. Time travel *should* scare away more novice sci-fi writers than it does because more often than not, it's used as a cheap deus ex machina to introduce or resolve some part of the plot (like in the SG-1 season 8 finale, series finale, or *most* of Enterprise). If you want to explore time travel - explore it! Don't use it as a cheap gimmick to push along (or reboot!!) the story.

He basically turned Star Trek into a Michael Bay movie and of course the same moronic people who love the Terminator franchise rant and rave about how good his rebooted trek is.

Hey, what's wrong with the Terminator franchise? The first movie was great, the sequel was pretty good, and the TV series was brilliant. It's not like there were any more movies. I heard they did some kind of Transformers crossover thing a couple of years back, but you shouldn't judge the series by cheap imitations.

Let us not discount the Damon Lindelof phenomenon -- he wrote Prometheus and Cowboys vs. Aliens, and bears most of the responsibility for the Lost storyline. (He's also writing Into Darkness).

Then again, if yo've ever seen J. J. Abrams tell his "Mystery Box" Story [ted.com] it's pretty hard to not come to the conclusion that he's motivated by at least a little contempt for the audience's intelligence.

Yeah, right. Who's the bigger dumb-ass - the one who has watched it though and considers it shit, or the moron who has just publicly admitted to pirating it, still has it on their lap-top, and still has not managed to watch it all the way though because it is so incredibly bad? Hmmm? And your post was marked 'insightful'. Really? Are you guys on crack?

The guy who recommended it to me - I bitch slapped him back to last week. Perhaps I should have pounded him a bit further so he could warn me that watching it would have been (be?) a bad idea.

Actually, he might have a point. I agree that time travel is a great thing if done right (Babylon 5 IMHO does it splendidly), but most movies/series do not pull it off. It end up being an inconsistent, illogical deux-ex-machina. I mean, I love fiction and fantasy, but that does not mean that I turn my brain off and believe anything.

And I could not even enumerate the number of idiotic scenes in the last Star Trek movie! Just one example: "No, I can't kill you for mutiny, I'll have to abandon you without supplies on a frozen planet, in a star system were a black hole was just created! That's clearly more logical and humane! But hey, look at the bright side, maybe if you walk around for a while you'll meet a future copy of myself, and then find the only guy in the galaxy that can beam us to a moving ship (1 in a trillion odds, pretty easy), so you'll get back, in which case I'm not going to throw you out of an airlock, but make you captain above all my other qualified lieutenants... but just for a while, since to stop a bunch of miners that can suddenly put the galaxy on it's feet we'll beam ourselves to their ship and stop them hand to hand. What do you say? Why not beam a time-bomb or a few dozen armed guys just to be on the safe side? Nah, no fun in that. Also, it seems like overkill to me, it's only the Earth at stake here, remember? Kneel before my superior logic!"

Star Trek was an abomination. Being able to beam into warp destroys the Star-Trek universe worse than midichlorians ever did.

Not at all. All Scotty had to do was reverse the polarity of the beam, and boom! Problem solved!

Seriously, if you are worried about the coherency of the Star Trek universe... well, lets just say that ship sailed around, oh, the second episode of the original series? Being generous. Transporters alone "destroyed" the Star Trek universe. Hell, they weren't even supposed to exist (they are vastly more advanced than the Federation should have had, given the rest of their technology), but the show didn't have the budget for a shuttle.

Meanwhile, those of us that like both Star Wars & Star Trek are thinking, "hrrm, Episode 7 has a chance now of not sucking."

Assuming you actually liked Star Trek XI, which I didn't. At all. Not even a bit. In fact, I rated it my second worst Star Trek movie (saved from the bottom only by The Final Frontier). Want some reasons? I've got plenty, but here's just a few (spoilers incoming!):

First, I see a lot of people talking about transwarp beaming, with some even defending it going "Oh, well you know beaming was just to save on money in the first place", which was was, which is irrelevant. Beaming was fine because beaming had rules. You can only beam over certain distances, you can't beam through certain atmospheric conditions, you can't beam at warp unless it's between two ships and they're both going at exactly the same speed and you have an extremely skilled operator. These rules keep it from being too powerful a plot device. So what does Abrams do? Transwarp beaming! Beam to a ship ridiculous distances away that's travelling at warp from a (relatively) stationary planet!

That's bullshit because it's just lazy. Abrams wrote himself into a corner. Kirk needs to be on the planet to meet future Spock but Kirk and Scotty need to be on the Enterprise to fulfil their destinies, but oh shit the Enterprise warped off fucking hours ago. I know! Deus ex machina, and they're in the engineering section. It's just bad writing.

It also brings me too... oh fucking hell, give me a second. It brings me too... the worst set. In all of Star Trek history. Even the Original Series. That engineering section. Just... what? Seriously, what? What is it? What are all these pipes? What do they do? How do they fit on the Enterprise? What was the designer smoking? I really, really don't get this set. Even in a narrative sense, what's it for? One stupid scene where Scotty gets stuck in the pipes? You could've cut that whole scene from the movie and nothing else would have to change. So why? Why not at least make it match the bridge and shuttlebay in style and design rather than feeling like a totally difference franchise in there?

Oh, but then we come to style and design. It's just rule of cool, even when it makes no sense. The Romulan mining ship? A 'simple mining ship' that looks like some fever-dreamed eldrich abomination? I mean, I know it has to look imposing but that's not just some lowly mining ship so why does it look like that? Because it's cool of course! Explanations are for losers! Also 'red matter', surely the midicholorians of Star Trek. An incredibly powerful substance out of nowhere that can make black holes out of nothing and destroy whole stars because that's not overpowered. Also, 'red matter'? Even Spock calls it red matter, is that really what it's called? That's the scentific name? Red matter? They couldn't even care enough to give it a vaguely 'sciency' name like 'trilithium' from Generations? It may be small, but the small things are what make you know they care, and they didn't with this movie.

If this is what Star Wars VII is going to be like then we're going to see something very special. We're going to see the franchise find an even lower place than the prequel trilogy.

I wouldn't say that the time travel where the problem with Lost, the main problem with Lost was building up all this backstory with Dharma & Co and then end it all with "oh we crated a faked dream world so that we all could go to heaven together".

Random dice rolls? No, that would have turned out better. More like they waited for fans to post theories and did exactly the opposite - regardless of the consequences. It ruined the last season (which completely flip-flopped mid-season and tried to retcon previous events into a new scenario).